This month for The Wrath-Bearing Tree my column is called Fallujah-Korengal/Korengal-Fallujah. In it, I explore how books and movies about the two GWOT battlegrounds mentioned in the title don’t just describe events but help create a near-mythic aura. Check it out!
As memories of ground combat in Iraq and Afghanistan fade into history, so too slows the pace of narratives that depict fighting men and women in post-9/11 combat action. From what I observe, the large American publishing houses have little interest in publishing novels about war in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor does there appear to be a mass reading audience clamoring for such fare. The big three vet-authors who have undeniably made it as professional writers—Phil Klay, Matt Gallagher, and Elliot Ackerman—are moving on to other subjects and writing identities not strictly identified with their formative years deployed on Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom. The same might be said of some of the vet-poets who were prominent a decade or so ago. A number of other vet-writers and affiliated civilian-authors in the war-making scene appear to have gone fallow or given up. New lights might shine for a season, but sustained achievement and acclaim await.
And yet… and yet….
On a smaller scale, fiction and poetry in which Iraq and Afghanistan figure, or serves as a backdrop, or as the genesis for the writing impulse keeps coming. Here’s to the authors, to the readers, and most of all to the publishing houses who keep war-and-mil writing alive. More than just alive, really, but expanding and developing. It’s not enough to tell an old story in an old way, and new perspectives and story-lines aplenty are on display in the titles I survey below.
Michael Anthony, with art by Chai Simone, Just Another Meat-Eating Dirtbag. Street Noise Books, 2022.
Anthony’s memoir Civilianized is one of the best traumatized-and-dysfunctional vet sagas going, and now his graphic-memoir Just Another Meat-Eating Dirtbag spins the story of his long journey back from war in unexpected and completely original directions. Finding love with a vegan animal rights activist, the title character, named Michael, grapples with his own ideas and beliefs about the subjects and discovers they are more deeply seated in his war experience than he cares to confront. Though packed with vegan and animal-rights polemics, Just Another Meat-Eating Dirtbag manages to avoid preachiness while also telling a very human story about strained relationships and the redemptive power of love.
Amber Adams, Becoming Ribbons. Unicorn Press, 2022.
Becoming Ribbons features several poems about Adams’ own deployment as an Army reservist, but the bulk of the poems relate the story of her long-term relationship with a Marine spouse. Looking back at high school and courtship, then exploring marriage in the midst of multiple deployments, moving on to her spouse’s wounding and rehabilitation, and then followed by divorce, her ex-husband’s suicide, and then her own new love, Becoming Ribbons covers a lot of narrative ground, even as each individual poem stands on its own as a unique, discreet verse. Adams’ poetry is deft and mature, while also being remarkably open about fraught events and vexed emotional responses.
M.C. Armstrong, American Delphi. Family of Lights Books, 2022.
Armstrong is not a vet, but he crafted a perceptive and finely-wrought memoir about a short-stint as a journalist with a Special Forces team in Iraq titled The Mysteries of Haditha. Now comes American Delphi, a Young Adult novel about a troubled adolescent girl and her troubled combat-veteran father. I haven’t read American Delphi yet, but as Time Now has regrettably not paid much attention to GWOT YA, I hope to soon. Bonus points for what American Delphi promises are futuristic tech-y elements and a trenchant engagement with social-media-based political activism.
Randy Brown, Twelve O’Clock Haiku: Leadership Lessons from Old War Movies and New Poems. Middle West Press, 2022.
The war-writing scene knows well Randy Brown under his nom-de-plume Charlie Sherpa. Whatever name he goes by, Brown combines his own writing talent with endless support of other vet-authors. Now comes Twelve O’Clock Haiku, an ingenious amalgamation of critical reflections on the WWII Air Force classic-movie Twelve O’Clock High, haikus on the same, and a sampling of previous published verse. Avoiding cant, bromides, and tired wisdom about military leadership, Twelve O’Clock Haiku delights with insights that hit first as clever, and then as poignant and profound.
Eric Chandler, Kekekabic. Finishing Line Press, 2022.
Chandler, a retired Air Force pilot, wrote at length about war in his first book of poetry Hugging This Rock. War is barely mentioned in his latest collection Kekekabic, but lurks everywhere. Nominally a set of poetic meditations on a year spent running-and-hiking, the taut poetic forms Chandler employs—haibun and haiku—bespeak the “blessed rage for order” of a combat vet still simmering down from overseas war, even as cultural wars and politicized violence burns ever hotter on the home-front. The calm, observant wisdom on display in Kekekabic is the farthest thing imaginable from the overheated discourse of today’s public sphere, and all the better for it.
Brian O’Hare, Surrender. Syracuse UP, 2022.
O’Hare’s Iraq was Operation Desert Storm, not Iraqi Freedom, but the sensibility binding the linked stories featuring a disenchanted Marine lieutenant in Surrender will be very familiar to GWOT vets. Taking aim at toxic paternal authority, whether in the form of an overbearing combat-vet father, a tyrannical high-school football coach, or an incompetent and delusional Marine battalion commander, Surrender’s stories are remarkably varied, even, and accomplished. It took O’Hare thirty years to find his voice; his debt to GWOT war-writing is prominent in Surrender, which he well admits in this astute essay for Electric Lit titled “9 Books That Take Aim at the Myth of the American Hero.”
Jennifer Orth-Veillon, editor, Beyond Their Limits of Longing: Contemporary Writers and Veterans on the Lingering Stories of World War I. MilSpeak Books, 2022.
Featuring a who’s-who of contemporary war-writing authors, Beyond Their Limits of Longing asks its contributors to ruminate on an aspect of World War I that is personally meaningful and not generally well-known. Combining scholarship, personal essays, fiction, and poetry, there’s not a mundane piece among the 70+ chapters. Editor Jennifer Orth-Veillon astutely discerned that GWOT vet-writers’ connection to World War I—both the battlefields and the literature that resulted—might be profound, and Beyond Their Limits of Longing rewards that intuition in spades.
Ben Weakley, Heat + Pressure: Poems from War. Middle West Press, 2022.
I’ve yet to read Heat + Pressure, but if it’s published by Randy Brown’s Middle West Press and blurbed by Brian Turner, it’s got to be good. Its Amazon page relates that Weakley, an Army combat vet, found his inclination to write in post-service vet-writing workshops. That’s a story right there—one of the great through-lines of the vet-writing scene, now in its fifteenth year or so, is how writing workshops have encouraged writing initiative and created opportunity for talent to flourish.
Prompted by a query from Brian Turner, I began reading Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs recently. For a while, we exchanged texts regarding our progress and impressions. The texts dropped off after a while, and as I write I’m not sure if Brian is still reading or has finished the 763-page tome, but I soldiered on to the end and completed it last week. Soldiering on in fact wasn’t so hard, although the book contains a multitude of detail-oriented descriptive passages, offered without flourish, along the lines of “McPherson’s corps was on the right, Hooker’s corps in the center, and Thomas’s division on the left.” These sentences and the book’s length won’t appeal to everyone, but they also don’t account for its cumulative power. Grant’s Memoirs have been often praised, but here I’ll offer a few of my own impressions, which hopefully connect to Time Now’s preoccupation with post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Before I began reading, I had it mind that I had attempted it before without finishing. Early on though, I realized this wasn’t true and so surprising to me I was in the presence of a 19th-century soldier’s memoir, the genre contours with which I was familiar, but one which was both fresher and shot through with gravitas and an almost uncanny sense of purpose. Upon completion, I was struck by the fact that it ended with the end of the Civil War. There’s almost nothing about the post-war period, to include Reconstruction and Grant’s two terms as President. Somehow I wasn’t expecting that; in fact, I was expecting quite the opposite. As they stand, the Memoirs are remarkably coherent, but I wonder if they–as with Grant’s life–would have that same unity if they had followed Grant into his presidency.
Grant’s account of his boyhood and West Point years are hurried through, but the pace slows as he describes his participation as a junior officer in the Mexican War. He was always in staff positions, never in command, but in his supporting roles was able to see first-hand the deliberations of the generals in charge of the US army. Generally admiring, Grant clearly saw much and took good notes. Lessons learned about maneuvering forces to gain advantage while being alert to the requisites of transportation, communication, infrastructure, and logistics proved invaluable in the Civil War, writ far larger in scale and with far greater implications. He also saw enough fighting to apprehend what battle entailed, particularly how to recognize the key moment when an enemy wavers and victory is achievable. Grant doesn’t say so, but it’s clear that his superb judgement in military matters and supreme sense of purpose were honed by his early years as a lieutenant in Mexico.
The interwar years and early days of the Civil War are again hurried through, with Grant slowing the pace once more to recount the maneuvering that led to his first big victory at Vicksburg. Following that account, Grant meticulously takes the reader through the campaign to seize Chattanooga. Following description of victory there, Grant is placed in charge of all Union forces, and the Memoirs describe in detail how he beat Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia and seized Richmond, the twin victories that led to the surrender of the Confederacy.
It’s in the slow methodical depiction of these campaigns that the Memoirs gain force. The sense rendered is that Grant was unstoppable and that the Confederate generals and troops he faced were crushed as surely as a boa constrictor squeezes to death its prey. It’s clear that Grant is firmly trying to refute the reputation (often self-proclaimed, but also touted in the North) of the supremacy of Southern fighting prowess; in his account, and without bragging or even saying “I” at every turn, he and his army outmaneuvered and outfought their Southern counterparts on their own turf. In this, the prolonged descriptions accrue the same cumulative strength as Grant’s forces did in reality. While the Southern press remained hyperbolically optimistic until the end, knowing Southern leaders such as Lee and CSA president Jefferson Davis must have discerned the tenacity and shrewdness with which Grant kept coming, coming, and coming and consequently began to dread. From their point of view, the Memoirs might be read as horror-fiction, as if it were the story of an unstoppable evil genius who was going to vanquish the true heroes and ultimate victims of the story of the Civil War. Frankly, I don’t think they believed at the beginning of the war that the North would fight the secession hard, or could beat them if they tried. As Grant (greatly aided by Sherman and Sheridan) took their cities and destroyed their armies one-by-one, not only did their hope for success evaporate, but so did their sense of their moral and martial supremacy and their belief that their presumed rightness of cause would ensure their victory. As they began to understand what they were up against, it’s a wonder they didn’t make Grant’s death their goal and strive to attain it by any means possible. From the perspective of the North, it’s hard not to believe Grant’s own assertion that his design, if not his leadership, led to the fastest resolution of the war possible, and perhaps even was the only path to victory.
The Memoirs contain remarkably little personal anecdotes and description of soldiering beyond the grand sweep of moving corps and divisions left or right, and only terse evaluations of other generals on either side of the conflict. But those offered are impactful. Witnessing the carnage in the aftermath of a direct hit on a Navy gunboat on the Mississippi seems to have sparked his utmost apprehension of the gruesomeness of combat (and this after Shiloh!). Grant speaks with admiration of the toughness of the Union soldiers, especially toward the end of the war, when they could march and fight for days on half-rations and no sleep, while becoming expert in ancillary arts of war such as trench-digging, bridge-building and both destroying and laying railroad tracks. His most common praise for junior officers is “gallant,” by which he seems to mean courage in battle. Of his senior officers he appreciated prompt obedience to orders, smart decision-making in the absence of orders, and willingness to press the battle unto victory. Officers who were slow to act or too independent of his designs irritated him to no end, and he found ways to get rid of or sideline them. He hated self-promotion, and in one place writes to the effect that an officer who actively agitated for a higher position almost never did as well as a humbler, quieter officer who took care of the business in front of him until asked to take on bigger responsibilities. Grant never admits for a second that the South had any right to secede, and never grants them the dignity of suggesting that they were a true independent nation. Likewise, he never waivers in affirming that slavery was wrong and was the root cause of the rebellion.
So much of Grant’s military ethos informs the doctrine of the Army in which I served as an officer for 28 years that I wonder that no one ever told me how much of it was on display in the Memoirs and perhaps even distilled from them. Combined arms and maneuver warfare, unity of action concentrated at decisive points, and the importance of commander’s intent were staple concepts of Grant’s Army and the late 20th and early 21st century Army, too, at least in peacetime and in training. Grant was never not aware that the North’s resolve to win the war was never as great as his own, and that victories first small and then big were important to maintain enthusiasm and support. He never let the wavering enthusiasm of the Northern populace and press trouble his own resolve, except as a reminder that he needed to pursue victory firmly and quickly. He was also ever-aware that fighting on offense against the South while in the South, surrounded by an unfriendly population and far from bases of support, made his job astronomically more difficult than that of Pemberton, Bragg, and Lee, the generals respectively in charge of the defenses of Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and Richmond.
Reflecting on these matters as they pertain to Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s clear that they all had correlatives but also that they all went kablooey in our 15+ years of military muddling in those countries. That’s not to say that a Grant might have saved those wars, although the cycling through of four-star general commanders betrayed something of a hope that one of them might have miraculously turned out to be another Grant. Reading the Memoirs places in high relief the differences between how we waged war unto victory then and how we have not done so more recently.
The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Edited by John F. Marszalek with David S. Nolen & Louie P. Gallo. Belknap-Harvard, 2017.
Early in the emergence of Iraq and Afghanistan war-writing as a recognizable genre, the center-of-gravity, to use military-speak, shifted from interest in events experienced on deployment and the battlefield to the difficulty of the homecoming and reintegration into civilian life. At first, this interest was focused on the individual veteran, often wracked by guilt, as he or she tried to find their way post-service. Later, interest in veterans as a cohort emerged, as they represented a demographic block within the greater populace asserting their views and needs in the wake of the end of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the election of President Trump, Covid, and all else. The first theme has found countless expression in fiction, poetry, and memoir, with Phil Klay’s Redeployment stories most famously addressing the veterans’ search for equilibrium and purpose in a society that little understood them. The second theme plays out daily in the news and on social media, but has yet to find robust expression in imaginative literature, though Matt Gallagher’s novel Empire City has admirably pioneered exploration of the contentious ways veterans position themselves, and are positioned by others, for recognition in the cultural and political sphere, as well as the consequential and cumulative effect of prolonged overseas war-faring on the shape of everyday American life.
Recently, two events have given me opportunity to consider anew these trends. First, an offer from the Task & Purpose online veterans journal to review The Shot: The Harrowing Journey of a Marine in the War on Terror, the memoir of former-Marine Bill Bee, brought the theme of the struggling veteran back into focus. You can read the review here; in sum, Bee describes a ten-year journey post-deployment to settle down after the intense highs and lows of four deployments to Afghanistan. In the review, I don’t use Stacey Peebles’ prescient line about contemporary war-lit’s dominant narrative arc—the story of a veteran who thought he or she was prepared for what they might face at war, only to find out how wrong they were—but it well applies. Bee seems to have come to writing only recently. Though he describes being a big reader as a youth, he doesn’t portray himself as now or ever being a budding member of the vet-writing literati, nor does writing as a means of dealing with his troubles seem to have occurred to him as he cycled through a number of treatment programs for PTSD and TBI and various life-changes. The Shot is all the more interesting for that. Prompted into writing by co-author Wills Robinson, Bee conveys in The Shot an “as told to” feel characteristic of sports-star and entertainment-celebrity autobiographies. The clear retelling of battlefield events and home-front struggle is a bracing reminder of how intense was the fighting and how serious and long-lasting were the physical and emotional wounds.
Regarding the societal consequences of long-lasting war, I recently watched the play Thou Shalt Not, staged in New Brunswick, NJ (where I live) and written, directed, and acted in by Iraq and Afghanistan veteran J.M. Meyer (along with his wife and co-collaborator Karen Alvarado). The play concerns a famous 1922 double-murder and subsequent trial that took place in New Brunswick; Meyer and his acting troupe Thinkery & Verse recreate the events, as told mostly through the eyes of the daughter of one of the victims, with an added fillip of interest being that they stage the play in the actual church where both victims worshipped. Nothing in the play directly references World War I, and it might be slightly specious to suggest that the murder in its time and the play now helps us understand the 1920s cultural climate as it was influenced by World War I, to say nothing of the current post-GWOT era. But perhaps not entirely so. The case, known as the Hall-Mills murder, was interpreted in its time as a symptom of a society that in the go-go 1920s had lost its collective mind by, among others, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who incorporated elements of the case into The Great Gatsby, which has often been explained as the story of an America reeling in the social tumult occasioned by The Great War. Among the larger themes channeled in Thou Shalt Not are loss of community, religious hypocrisy, media frenzy, judicial bias, and class inequity, all of which have their counterparts today. Most of all, Thou Shalt Not’s interest in the daughter’s plight, left to cope with the disreputable life-events that led to her mother’s murder as they were bandied in the press for the better part of a decade, shrewdly reflects vet-writing’s preoccupation with post-trauma guilt and confusion.
I know J.M. Meyer (and have written about him here), but not well enough to say whether he consciously wrote contemporary war themes into his play. No matter the source, the artistic imagining on display in Thou Shalt Not is dazzling. Far from being a staid dinner-theater whodunnit, Thou Shalt Not is highly inventive, shot through with theatrical artifice and interesting casting and staging choices. Meyer immerses the audience into the proceedings at several points, and when spectators are left alone to contemplate the murders and trial they are exposed to a barrage of conflicting perspectives and often-spectacular recreations of events that trouble easy understanding while delighting the desire to be entertained. I’ve always been curious about veterans who are drawn to theater and film, especially in roles as playwrights, directors, and producers. In this line Myer reminds me of more well-known vet-dramatists such as Maurice Decaul, Benjamin Busch, and even Adam Driver (and now comes news that Veterans Writing Project founder Ron Capps is writing and staging plays, too). All are former infantrymen, now highly cerebral and creative artists, attracted to ensemble performative endeavor, and with little desire to tell simple stories in simple ways. What’s up with that?
With the publication of Ray McPadden’s war memoir We March at Midnight, hard upon his novel And the Whole Mountain Burned, the already-robust body of war writing published by former soldiers (all officers, as it happens) of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division grows stronger. Joining McPadden, the count includes Adrian Bonenberger, Drew Pham, Kristin L. Rouse, Sean Parnell, and Brett Allen—each with one or more book-length works and/or many occasional pieces published in vet-writing journals and elsewhere, most about or inspired by deployments to Afghanistan with 10th Mountain. I include myself, too, by affiliation. Though I did not deploy with 10th Mountain to Iraq or Afghanistan, as the post-9/11 era dawned I was stationed at Fort Drum, NY, with the division, where I served first as the Secretary of the General Staff and then as the Executive Officer of 2-14 Infantry “Golden Dragons” in the division’s Second Brigade. Late in 2001, 2-14 did deploy to Kosovo on a peacekeeping mission, where we seethed with jealousy as sister battalions from 10th Mountain were among the first to fight in Afghanistan.
10th Mountain, as I remember it, was a no-frills, no-nonsense light infantry division. We had no sense of ourselves as an elite unit such as the 82nd Airborne or 75th Rangers, but we still took pride in our competency and toughness, which was honed by the brutal winter weather of New York state’s “North Country” hard-by Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. It’s fair to say that few requested assignment to 10th Mountain and Fort Drum, but once there we made the best of it. The “Mountain” part of the division name was an ode to the unit’s World War II roots in mountain-warfare and had little relation to flat Fort Drum save for the cold, snowy winters we endured. Still, the name and the heritage infused us with knowledge that to be a member of 10th Mountain stood for values and a tradition we better not let down. We trained hard and deployed often, even before 9/11. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unfolded, 10th Mountain units were on near-constant rotation to one of the two countries, leading to the claim that 10th Mountain has been the most deployed division in the Army since 2001. I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but if not, it’s got to be pretty close.
So, just based on sheer numbers, it’s probably not surprising that so many 10th Mountain soldiers sought expression for their stories and views-of-things in print. But is there anything more that might account for their impulse to write following service? And is there a particular tenor to the body of work by 10th Mountain vets? If so, what is it, and why?
Short answer: I don’t know. It might just be coincidence. It might be though that I’m afeard to face the truth, for at first blush 10th Mountain doesn’t come off very well in the memoirs and fiction written by its veterans. None of them in particular take aim at 10th Mountain as a flawed entity distinct from other, better units, but almost all give full vent to unsatisfactory deployment experiences. The dissatisfaction takes many shapes. For some, it was crystallization of the awareness of the futility and stupidity of the overall mission. For others, it was horrendous combat experiences that deprived them of their ability to take pride in their fighting prowess. Others describe toxic command climates and poor leadership. These last sting me in particular, for I know personally or by reputation many of the leaders mentioned by name or described fictionally in the works. Some I consider friends, and most I had a reasonably high regard for. Hell, I was a field-grade officer myself, and though a lowly one, probably more part of the problem than an antidote to it in the eyes of disgruntled and disappointed junior officers and soldiers.
Oh well, I’ll just have to deal with that. For students of America’s war in Afghanistan, there is much to be gleaned from the words of 10th Mountain veterans. If you want to know what fighting was like at battalion-level in work-a-day units in eastern Afghanistan, or what the range of attitudes toward the military, the mission, and Afghans were held by those who belonged to such units might be, Bonenberger, Parnell, Rouse, Pham, McPadden, and Allen have left quite a record. Much is admirable, some is not, most is understandable, and none is beyond critique. I don’t love it all equally, and it’s not all the same, but now’s not the time to make distinctions. It’s easy to tell the writers tried hard to do well while in Afghanistan as members of 10th Mountain, and now while trying to convey what was special about their experience in their books–even if by “special” we really mean “troubling.” Thank you all for writing, and I hope you find many more readers.
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A selected list of fiction and memoir by 10th Mountain Division veterans. I’ve also included links to articles the authors have written about the end of the American war in Afghanistan.
Bret Allen, Kilroy Was Here (novel)
Adrian Bonenberger, Afghan Post (memoir) and The Disappointed Soldier and Other Stories from War (short-stories)
Also: “America’s War in Afghanistan is Over but Our Big Lies About It Live On.”
Ray McPadden, And the Whole Mountain Burned (novel) and We March at Midnight (memoir)
Sean Parnell, Outlaw Platoon (memoir). Parnell has also written a military-thriller titled Man of War.
Drew Pham, “On Their Lips, The Name of God”
“Brother Forgive Me. I Cannot Bear the Consequences of This War Alone.”
“From Vietnam to Afghanistan and Back: An Offering”
Kristen L. Rouse, “Pawns” (short story included in the anthology The Road Ahead) and many non-fiction articles, to include this recent one:
“A US Veteran Says the Afghans She Served With Believe They Are Going to Die.”
Finally, a memoir about life at Fort Drum as the wife of a many-times deployed officer is Angie Ricketts’ No Man’s War: Irreverent Confessions of an Infantry Wife.
UPDATE: I’m reminded that poet Brian Turner soldiered as an enlisted infantryman in 10th Mountain Division and deployed with them to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000. An impressive addition to the roster of 10th Mountain writers!
I’m very happy to have my interview with veteran-author Mary “M.L.” Doyle appear in the latest issue of 0-Dark-Thirty, the literary journal published by the Veterans Writing Project. Getting to know Doyle and her work has been both enjoyable and illuminating. As the headnote to the interview explains, the uniqueness of Doyle’s perspectives and the variety of her titles are impressive. Both her personal background and her writing ventures—an African-American former Army sergeant first class who writes military crime fiction and military-themed urban romance/fantasy while co-authoring memoirs of prominent minority women-in-uniform—intrigued me greatly upon learning about them. Our interview fulfilled expectations that her thoughts about it all would be as interesting as the works themselves.
For readers interested in exploring Doyle’s books, I suggest starting with her military crime novel debut The Peacekeeper’s Photograph (2013). Set in Bosnia on an Army FOB in the 1990s, The Peacekeeper’s Photograph is the first of three “Master Sergeant Harper” mysteries Doyle has now authored. It features many elements relatively untouched by most contemporary war lit: not just Bosnia, but a female senior NCO’s perspective, command group treachery, soldier romance, Army racial dynamics, and the threat of rape faced by military women if captured. Readers might also try The Bonding Spell (2015), about a female Iraq War veteran who channels the spirit of an ancient Sumerian goddess after picking up a magical relic while deployed. I also recommend I’m Still Standing: From Captive US Soldier to Free Citizen (2011), Specialist Shoshana Johnson’s memoir that Doyle co-wrote. Johnson, if you will remember, was the African-American junior enlisted cook who was captured by Iraqi insurgents along with Jessica Lynch in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Considering Johnson’s view of war alongside that of not Lynch’s, but, say, ex-SEAL Matt Bissonnette’s, as expressed in his memoir No Easy Day, which I also read recently, juxtaposes the diverse experiences of Americans who serve the nation in uniform–and all the advantages and rectitude do not necessarily accrue to sagas of white male combat-arms super-warriors. To be clear, I thought No Easy Day was fascinating and salute Bissonnette’s combat prowess, but I’m Still Standing, as does everything Doyle writes, demonstrates how the military is many people and many things.
The interview offers Doyle’s insights about all I’ve mentioned above and much else, to include her views on the rewards of independent publishing. Please read it and then seek out Doyle’s own remarkable body of work—really, start anywhere and you won’t go wrong.
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A final note: As the Mentor Program Coordinator for the Veterans Writing Project, I’ve matched up some 30 aspiring veteran-writers with experienced authors and teachers in online mentoring relationships. We now need more mentors, so if you have time, inclination, and ability, I’d love to hear from you. The aspiring writers are wide-ranging in age and writing interests, but some basic splits are between male/female, Vietnam/Iraq-Afghanistan, and fiction/memoir/poetry/screenwriting, and I do my best to match veterans and mentors who will prove compatible. No military experience is required for mentors–just a capacity to teach and a desire to help. You can reach me at petermolin@msn.com.
…aren’t so lazy and hazy if you live in the New York City area, where the artistic and intellectual processing of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan affords almost too many events to absorb. The highlight of the summer is the staging in Saratoga Springs (180 miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan) of an opera based on Brian Castner’s memoir The Long Walk. Castner probably didn’t see it coming, but in retrospect it’s not hard to recognize his memoir’s operatic potential. Castner’s record of his tours in Iraq as the head of an Air Force Explosives Ordnance Disposal detachment and his troubles readjusting to civilian life afterwards is fine in its particulars—in a perfect world it would be more popular than American Sniper. It’s got more harrowing combat scenes, for instance, as well as better descriptions of specialized military training and more honest, reflective, and generous portraits of how difficult redeployment can be. But what really elevates The Long Walk is Castner’s imagining of his life in terms of darker, larger, may I say mythic forces that imbue existence with cosmic significance. In particular, Castner describes what it means to be overcome by “The Crazy”—those oh-fuck moments after war when you realize just how screwed over combat and danger have made you, no matter how normal you appear or try to be. Castner’s richly-situated exploration of the larger-than-life forces that envelop him are I’m sure what inspired the opera producers Jeremy Beck and Stephanie Fleischmann.
More prosaic, but still exciting, war-lit readings are taking place within the city itself. Words After War impresarios Brandon Willitts and Matt Gallagher are sponsoring not one, but two series of readings. Monthly events at The Folly, a Greenwich Village bar partly owned by Gallagher, have featured local veteran and military-themed writers, such as Mariette Kalinowski, Kristin Rouse, and Jake Siegel, as well as civilian authors, reading unpublished and recently published work in an intimate setting. Words After War also co-sponsors a second set of readings, called Danger Close, in conjunction with New York University English professor Patrick Deer. Deer is part an academic consortium named the Cultures of War and Postwar Research Group and the author of Culture in Camouflage, a study of literature written in Britain during World War II, so it’s great that he has now turned his attention to contemporary American war writing while helping showcase its authors in intriguing pairings with compelling moderators. One Danger Close event featured Phil Zabriskie and Jesse Goolsby in conversation with Lea Carpenter, and a second had Myra Jacob hosting authorial collaborators Gavin Kovite and Christopher Robinson along with August Cole and P.W. Singer. And as if that weren’t enough, the energetic and innovative Willitts and Gallagher have announced a third event, a one-off called Writing War, to take place July 30 at the Brooklyn Historical Society and featuring Phil Klay, Matt Gallagher, Sara Novic, and Maurice Decaul.
Words After War is by far not the only game in New York town, either. War author and Restrepo filmmaker Sebastian Junger, for example, has been hosting readings featuring veteran authors and war journalists at HIS bar-restaurant the Half-King and elsewhere in the city. Earlier in the summer, Arts in the Armed Forces, a vet-friendly organization founded by actor and ex-Marine Adam Driver, helped promote an off-Broadway play by Daniel Talbott titled Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait. Alex Mallory, who has staged at least two plays about war in Iraq with her troupe Poetic Theater, is back July 27 with a staged reading of her work There Are No Camels in Beirut, about conflict in that strife-torn city in 2006. Invitations to events and announcement of new programs by writing collectives such as Voices From War and the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop arrive weekly if not daily. And in the most out-of-the-blue way possible, I’ve been consulted by the event-designers of Gigantic Mechanic, a Brooklyn arts initiative currently developing an interactive theater experience called Hearts and Minds, which will allow audience members to role-play members of an infantry squad on patrol in Iraq. That’s not quite as cool as having an opera made of your life, but I’m flattered to have been asked for input.
So that’s New York for you, creatively and endlessly engaged and productive. I hope things are as busy and interesting as you want them to be wherever you are this summer.
I’ve been asked to contribute to an anthology of essays on American Sniper and have been working on my contribution the past few weeks. The project’s given me a chance to reread many of the reviews published upon the memoir’s and then the movie’s releases, and below I offer a list of some of the most pertinent ones. One subject of discussion has been whether Clint Eastwood’s movie version of American Sniper is faithful to Kyle’s memoir and if either the movie or the book fully and accurately relate the totality of Kyle’s life and service. Other reviews ask what is so “American” about Kyle and his brand of sniper-heroics. Still others question whether the movie glamorizes war generally or justifies specifically war in Iraq and glorifies the contributions of Navy SEALs to the American military effort. Some reviews take issue with the movie’s portrait of Iraqi civilians and combatants, while a final set discusses the memoir’s and film’s depiction of the potentially traumatic effects of combat and deployment.
Taken together, the memoir, the film, the reviews, and everything and everyone pertaining to their production and distribution, to include the thoughts of the real-life men and women portrayed, to include Kyle’s victims, constitute what Israeli photography critic Ariella Azoulay would call an interpretive “situation”: analysis of an artistically- and technologically-shaped representation of a real-world person or event that incorporates everything that has been said and could be said about both, in order to elicit the most detailed and just understanding of the moral, political, and aesthetic stakes involved. A tall order indeed–too tall for me here, but no doubt the American Sniper situation allows us to gain traction on at least two pertinent questions about the millennial wars:
What does it take for young Americans to kill in combat, what is it like to kill in combat, and what is it like to live afterwards?
What stories about war connect with audiences and why?
I’m writing my anthology contribution on the first question, so will hold my thoughts here, but am happy to take a swing at the question about American Sniper‘s astounding popularity. I think a lot of something Edgar Allan Poe wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1848. Speaking of Hawthorne’s short story collections in the years prior to writing The Scarlett Letter, Poe wrote, “But the simple truth is, that a writer who aims at impressing the people is always wrong when he fails in forcing that people to receive the impression. How far Mr. Hawthorne has addressed the people at all is, of course, not a question for me to decide. His books afford strong internal evidence of having been written to himself and his particular friends alone.”
That’s a fascinating statement. It suggests that if writers (and moviemakers) want to be popular, they have only themselves to blame if they aren’t. The subjects, themes, and styles that people like, Poe implies, are right there for the taking for he or she who will. I wonder how true that is? And if American Sniper‘s success means that contemporary war-story-tellers have finally hit the sweet spot of war-story popularity, I wonder what that bodes for war writing and war movie-making to come? As another critic of Poe’s time, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it when writing about American theater in Democracy in America (1835), “Authors soon discover the secret inclinations of public taste,” which suggests that the public’s inclinations don’t remain secret for very long. Chris Kyle’s co-authors were lawyer Scott McEwan and veteran writer of military thrillers Jim DeFelice, so we know he had experienced help shaping the material of his life so that it resonated with audiences. An even more telling statement comes from one of Kyle’s editors, Peter Hubbard, who is described in a New York Times article by Julie Bosman as saying that “he was determined to publish [American Sniper] for a general-interest reader, the kind of person who would pick up a big blockbuster thriller. ‘I didn’t want it to be characterized as a genre military book,’ he said. ‘It functions as a great action and adventure story.’” As is well-documted in many reviews below, Clint Eastwood and his screenwriter Jason Hall substantially altered Kyle’s memoir in ways that clearly tapped “the secret inclinations of public taste.” From an ethical-aesthetic perspective, the question is whether they did so according to their own sense of artistic integrity, cravenly, or both. You know what would be interesting? Another movie version of American Sniper, made by a filmmaker/screenwriter team with radically different ideas about Kyle and his memoir than had Eastwood and Hall. If that happened, we would definitely have a “situation” to consider.
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An American Sniper Critical Compendium
Julie Bosman. “A Wave of Military Memoirs With You-Are-There Appeal.” New York Times 18 March 2012.
Nicholas Schmidle. “In the Crosshairs.” The New Yorker 3 June 2013.
Brian Van Reet. “A Problematic Genre: ‘The Kill Memoir.'” New York Times 16 July 2013.
David James. “American Sniper and the Hero Myth.” Wrath Bearing Tree 17 December 2014.
David Denby. “Living History: Selma and American Sniper.” The New Yorker 22 December 2014.
Alex Horton. “American Sniper Feeds America’s Hero Compex, and It Isn’t the Truth About War.” The Guardian 24 December 2014.
Michael Cummings and Erin Cummings. “The Surprising History of American Sniper‘s ‘Wolves, Sheep, and Sheepdogs’ Speech.” Slate 21 January 2015.
Dana Stevens. “The Battle Over American Sniper.” Slate 21 January 2015.
“Confused About How You Are Supposed to Think About American Sniper? Here Are Twenty Thinkpieces That Can Help You Put Things in Perspective.” Clickhole 22 January 2015.
Brian Turner. “I Served in Iraq and American Sniper Gets It Right. But It’s Still Not the War Film We Need.” The Vulture 22 January 2015.
Adrian Bonenburger. “There Are No War Heroes: A Veteran’s Review of American Sniper.” The Concourse 23 January 2015.
Colby Buzzell. Chris Kyle and the Iraq War Are More Complex than American Sniper–or Criticism of It.” The Guardian 23 January 2015.
Courtney Duckworth. “How Accurate is American Sniper?” Slate 23 January 2015.
Roy Scranton. “The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to Redeployment and American Sniper.” Los Angeles Review of Books 25 January 2015.
Cara Buckley. “American Sniper Fuels a War on the Homefront.” New York Times 28 January 2015.
Susannah George. “Here’s What Moviegoers in Baghdad Think About American Sniper.” Global Post 28 January 2015.
Joe Davis. “A Former Marine’s Review of American Sniper.” Time 9 February 2015.
If you have suggestions for additions to this list, please let me know.
My review of Colby Buzzell’s latest essay and magazine article collection Thank You for Being Expendable is up at The Bridge, a website dedicated to “Policy, Strategy, National Security, and Military Affairs,” as their Medium site explains. The Bridge has actually run three reviews of Buzzell’s latest, so let me salute my co-reviewers, a US Army officer who goes by the nom-de-plume Angry Staff Officer and a US Air Force officer named Blair Shaefer, both of whom turn many nice phrases. The ASO, for example, writing of the senior junior enlisted faction of the military known as “E4s,” who tend to be the most reliable indicator of unit morale, writes, “if there actually was an E-4 Mafia, Colby Buzzell would be the godfather.” Shaefer describes Thank You For Being Expendable the “punk rock alternative to Service Academy and/or Ivy League-educated military officer GWOT memoirs.” Like!
I connected with The Bridge managing editor Nathan K. Finney through my involvement with the Military Writer’s Guild. MWG has been around for a while as an organization comprised (mostly) of serving and veteran writers of the serious policy and strategy analysis persuasion, but it has lately reinvigorated its recruiting efforts and extended its reach to a few of us on the artistic side of things. I’m glad to be part of MWG and eager to see where it goes. Publishing on Medium and using Slack to handle internal business has already made me feel a good twenty years younger, so things are off to an excellent start, as I see them.
Colby Buzzell, Thank You for Being Expendable, and Other Experiences. Byliner, 2015.
A “turn-and-burn” military convoy travels from one base to another, executes its business quickly, and then immediately returns home; the mission doesn’t allow for socializing or enjoying the destination post’s amenities. In Afghanistan, turn-and-burns were bummers, because, after risking our lives on the roads to ambushes and IEDs, we felt like we deserved to relax a bit before doing so again. My trip to the 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, or AWP15, held last weekend in Minneapolis, was a bit of a turn-and-burn for me, unfortunately, for I arrived Friday morning and by mid-Saturday afternoon I was already heading back to the airport. I packed in a lot in my 30 hours in Minnesota, but I also missed a few panels and chances for fun before my arrival and after my departure.
Minnesota, first time ever to the home of so many of my musical heroes! Dylan, Prince, the Replacements, Husker Dü, and even now the great Hold Steady, and where T.S. Eliot once spoke to 17,000 people in a hockey arena….
Musical and poetical rhapsodies aside, I wasn’t the only war writer who arrived in town possessed by a sense of purpose. For some, the urgency was born of dissatisfaction with the way war writing was represented at last year’s AWP14 in Seattle (though hopefully not with my panel there). Flashes of War author Katey Schultz, for example, explained that she left AWP14 feeling that civilian voices on war had been neglected. Siobhan Fallon wrote that she was glad to see so many women featured on war lit panels. Taking matters in his own hands, Benjamin Busch recruited an all-star line-up of war authors—Schultz, Fallon, Brian Turner, and Phil Klay—for a panel titled “Telling Our New War Stories: Witness and Imagination across Literary Genres.” Determined not to waste a second, Busch dispensed with author readings and and allowed for only a truncated audience Q&A. Instead, Busch himself interviewed the panelists, asking damn good questions about war-writing craft and politics that elicited thoughtful, thorough responses. For my part, knowing that I wouldn’t be on the ground long, I invited every war writer and scene-supporter I knew to dinner Friday night. It was a somewhat desperate ploy for company, but one that saved me from my usual conference fate—eating alone at McDonalds–so thank you everyone who came.
My speaking role at AWP15 was moderating a panel titled “Who Can’t Handle the Truth? Memoirs by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans,” featuring Ron Capps, Kayla Williams, and Colin Halloran. I contributed ten minutes of editorial overview, all which proved totally superfluous given the power of the readings and commentary that followed. Capps, Williams, and Halloran are each fully at home behind the podium, and any one of them could have commanded the audience’s attention for an hour. Their readings recounted harrowing moments during deployment and afterwards; war, military service, and life afterwards have not been easy for Capps, Williams, and Halloran, and their memoirs unflinchingly portray events that made it so and the pain and turmoil that ensued. As I listened, the sense that I got from their books that they had been pretty damn good (conscientious, competent, and energetic) soldiers in uniform was reinforced, and I wondered about the difference between the squared-away soldierly performances and the unraveling of the personal lives—as if a mil-civ divide within had chewed them up and made their lives a tumult. Capps, Williams, and Halloran used the “T-word”—trauma—directly, but sparingly, as if mindful that the word has become an 800-pound IED in rooms where veterans and veterans writing are discussed. Speaking of PTSD, for example, Capps said, “You can control it, but you can’t hope to cure it.” Their readings made clear, however, that their service had been traumatic and that writing about it played a therapeutic, or at least an important part, in their restoration to healthy and productive happiness. The mesmerized audience had plenty of questions, so I didn’t ask the one I prepared:
“18th-century English author Samuel Johnson wrote that ‘no one ever regrets serving as a soldier or sailor.’ In your mind is that statement wisdom or foolishness, either generally or personally? To the extent that you might regret serving, was it war or military culture that did the most damage? To the extent that you do not, what got you through the hardest part—writing, medication, therapy, love, friends, time, or something else?”
Another panel, titled “Writing as Therapy for War: Developing Stories and Poems with Witnesses and Soldiers,” unabashedly promoted the use of writing as rehabilitative for individuals brutalized by war, as a means of documenting injustice, and as a means of expressing outrage to powers-that-be. Poet, playwright, and essayist Maurice Decaul, head of a New York University veterans writer collective, said that for the collective’s members “writing was not meant to be therapeutic, but it often was.” The new director of Military Experience and the Arts website, David Ervin, an Iraq veteran, spoke openly about how his road to recovery from being “pretty messed up” owed much to writing. Olivia Cerrone, part of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, described how writing gave voice to Afghan women repressed by their own culture and damaged by war, while Elena Bell said much the same on behalf of Palestinian women in Israel.
Ben Busch’s questions for his all-killer, no-filler line-up of authors focused on large issues of political implication and writerly issues of craft. Brian Turner spoke of “complicity”—his effort to imbricate civilian reading audiences in the circle of responsibility for the damage done by war. Siobhan Fallon explained that part of her motivation in writing You Know When the Men Are Gone was her sense that the American public knew little about the war experience that soldiers and their families were enduring. Phil Klay said that he began to write after returning from Iraq and asking himself, “What the hell was that all about?” Katey Schultz reported that she began to write about war when she noticed how language had begun to grow distorted and then change in the years after 9/11. “A story begins with an unanswered question, and I had a lot,” she said. Turning to issues of craft, she said, “It took me a year to get the uniforms and equipment right and another year to figure out who called who ‘sir’ and then six more months to make the characters come alive.” On a roll, Schultz explained that there are many ways to write authentically about war besides personal witness and first-hand experience. Empathy and research are great teachers, too, she said, and spoke of how Google and YouTube aided her while writing Flashes of War. All the panelists had great anecdotes about the importance of research in bringing not just realistic detail but life to their stories. Turner spoke of reading late at night about a butterfly unique to Bougainville that then became a detail in a passage in My Life as a Foreign Country about his grandfather who fought there. Fallon described asking her husband to send her examples of soldier port-a-john graffiti, which he did, but that she eventually had to make up her own to create the perfect effect in a story. Klay described trying to attain a “thick knowledge” (anthropologist Clifford Geertz reference!) that allowed him to be comfortable “making things up and knowing it’s not bullshit.” Exactly what model of PVS-4 Night Vision Goggles did the Marines use in 2004 anyway? It matters, said Klay, along with a lot of other things that matter. But each knew the limits of journalistic-like quest for verisimilitude, too. Busch quoted Ron Capps to the effect that, “We can all get the facts. It’s what you do with them afterwards.”
On the subject of trauma, though, the authors’ remarks minimized the references that were everywhere in the “Writing as Therapy for War” panel, and they turned to the topic directly only as the panel came to a close. Klay, for example, asserted that war writers should be on guard to avoid “flattening the story into trauma,” an idea echoed by Busch, who asked if we might be encouraging veterans to repeatedly tell a certain kind of story when they speak or write of war. Writing, or life, the sentiment seemed to be, need not be defined by all-abiding concern with suffering focalized through the experience of individual soldiers or non-combatants. I’m sure the panelists are sympathetic to the “Writing as Therapy for War” panelists’ goals–they would probably say they are working for the same thing–and it’s also obvious that the characters in their own stories, poems, and memoirs have been severely rattled by war. But rather than relying on trauma tropes, the authors expressed interest in thinking expansively about what war writing can do and be; even in time of war military service is not only about pain and outrage–and if it is, the subjects can be approached from a variety of directions and perspectives. “Widen the palette,” Turner urged war writers, “use more of the imagination.”
So, turning and burning, war writing unfolds upon itself, revealing new problems and possibilities, proceeding in different registers, with varying points-of-view, goals, and subjects of emphasis. A view of things clear-cut to one or many may be problematic or uninteresting to others. Interestingly, the non-war lit panels I attended wrestled with many of the same issues pestering the war writing community. Judging by the titles alone makes the case: “Blood Will Out: Putting Violence on the Page.” “The Politics of Empathy: Writing Through Borrowed Eyes.” “Writing Atrocity: The Novel and Memoir of Political Witness.” How sensationally or how subtly should an author describe graphic violence? What are the problems associated with white men and women portraying dark-skinned characters? Has a war novel other than Sand Queen portrayed the indiscriminate killing, torture, drone strikes, soldier misconduct, and general officer maleficence that are unfortunately-but-undeniably now part of the American way-of-war? I didn’t know the authors on these panels, but was surprised at many turns about the relevance of their comments to war writing, and I’ll be seeding upcoming posts with their ideas.
A blog post about AWP15 war lit panels by Christopher Meeks is here.
A blog post about AWP15 by Andria Williams of the Military Spouse Book Review is here.
A blog post about AWP15, racism, and violence by Vanessa Martir is here.
Thank you to my fellow panelists Ron Capps, Kayla Williams, and Colin Halloran. I’m humbled by your eloquence and bravery and honored by your friendship.
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Introductory Remarks, “Who Can’t Handle the Truth: Memoirs by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans”
The American Civil War, in my understanding of things, was the first war to generate a subsequent “battle of the memoirs” in which Union and Confederate generals entertained readers with first-hand accounts of battlefield exploits and decisions, while also serving as correctives to other accounts, all the while cajoling for their places in history.
After subsequent wars, such as World War I, World War II, and Vietnam, memoirs written by generals and statesmen were also common, but they were joined and even supplanted in public interest by accounts written by veterans far farther down the chain-of-command than the vaunted army commanders of the North and South. We value the private soldier’s memoir, we seem to feel, because we think his, and now hers, recollections speak most truthfully to what it means to serve in combat and within a military culture that seems so increasingly foreign to civilian and peacetime life.
We honor these personal testimonies because we see in them an honesty and authenticity about war that we are not likely to get from journalism and history. We enjoy these sagas because we respect the impulse to document war and suspect that memoir writers use the power of memory and language not just to tell us about places and events that are thrilling and exotic, but to remind us that war is a brutal experience—one that requires careful retrospective handling by its participants to assess the exact nature of its horror and aid the memoir writer’s transition to effective, contributing member of the society that sent him or her off to war.
Perhaps the most striking memoir of the kind I have in mind was J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. First published in 1959, 14 years after Gray returned from four years of combat in Europe to become a professor of philosophy, The Warriors contains many insightful formulations about what a memoir written by a veteran might be and do. Glenn writes from his position as a university teacher in 1959: “Now it is almost as though [the war] never took place.” But he immediately reverses that sentiment, in the next line stating, “Yet something is wrong, dreadfully wrong.” Tempted by the impulse to forget, he fights back, for he knows that forgetting is not just a cop-out, but ultimately impossible. “What protrudes and does not fit in our pasts rises to haunt us and makes us spiritually unwell in the present,” he writes, and commits himself to the act of remembering. Noting that “war compresses the greatest opposites into the smallest space and the shortest time,” he feels a personal and social obligation to not to “continue to forget.” Gray writes, “The deepest fear of my war years, one still with me, is that these happenings had no real purpose.” If the effort to remember through writing did not have “some positive significance for my future life,” Gray concludes, “it could not possibly be worth the pain it cost” [to either live through the experience or write about it afterwards].
Today, we have a chance to take stock of the Iraq and Afghanistan war memoir by listening to three notable authors of the genre. Each of our readers has explored not just what it means to go to war, and be in war, but to return from war and live healthily and happily afterwards. The journey for each has not been easy, and I salute them for the toughness they displayed in confronting challenging episodes in their lives and then the candor, insight, and sense of perspective revealed in their writing. I know from my own experience writing about war and its aftermath that such tasks are not easy—it means being honest with oneself and taking risk in revealing the full dimensions of one’s struggles with reading audiences. I’m honored to be the host and moderator for this panel and eager to hear what they intend to share with us.
Our first reader is Ron Capps, a retired Army and State Department veteran who currently is director of the Veterans Writing Project, a Washington, DC-based organization with national reach that promotes veteran writing through workshops and its publication 0-Dark-Thirty. The wars of the 21st century were fought by members of the millennial generation, a group of young men and women notorious for their disrespect or obliviousness to age and precedence. But Ron Capps has been at the military and war fighting business for a long time, and his memoir Seriously Not All Right (2014) documents not just his experience as an officer-in-uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a longer pre-history as a State Department official on-the-ground for extensive periods in Kosovo and Africa. It is this larger, broader, longer view that I think distinguishes Capp’s perspective.
Our second panelist, Kayla Williams, has written two memoirs about her service in Iraq and afterwards. Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army (2006) came very early in the game and immediately staked out a position as an insightful, almost definitive articulation of what it means to be a woman in uniform, in the 21st century, during not just war but a period of intense reformulation of our ideas not just about women-in-uniform but gender and sexuality in our society at large. To my mind, no one more than Kayla has spoken as frankly about these issues as they pertain to the military that took men and women for the first time in significant numbers together overseas to fight and when not fighting co-exist together. Kayla has also published a second memoir, Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War (2014) that is equally candid and insightful about the rocky road of marriage she and her husband Brian, who was seriously injured in war, have traveled together since first meeting on a remote hilltop in Iraq.
While Ron Capps represents age on our panel and Kayla Williams signifies what is strikingly new about contemporary war and war authorship, our third panelist, Colin D. Halloran, embodies a much more traditional authorial position—that of a young, literary, middle-class male—Colin was 19 when he deployed to Afghanistan as any infantryman—with no particular inclination or aptitude for soldiering before he joined “to see war” and “serve his country.” Colin turned to poetry to portray vividly the physical experience and even more intensely the emotional experience of combat, service, and life afterwards. His Shortly Thereafter (2012), a memoir that combines verse and prose, is not just one of the very few instances of poetry written by an Afghanistan veteran, but is one of the few biographies of war written by a young enlisted soldier—a doubly-curious phenomenon given the library shelves full of memoirs written by former officers and Navy SEALS. A few years older now, Colin teaches writing at Fairfield University in Connecticut. But Colin, as I know him, will be the last to ever forget where he came from and is currently at work at both another volume of poetry and a memoir that addresses his war years using the arguably more direct medium of prose.
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Thanks to Roy Scranton for turning me on to J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors.
Yea for Minnesota, so below’s a special video insertion, the Hold Steady’s ode to the Minneapolis punk-rock scene, “Stay Positive”:
Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature 